On Thu, Jan 24, 2013 at 12:30 PM, Sylvain Galineau
<sylvaing@microsoft.com> wrote:
> [Tab Atkins Jr.:]
>> I'm arguing against Arron and Sylvain's assertions that we should decide,
>> from a theoretical perspective, whether to address placeholder styling
>> with a pseudoclass or pseudo-element, and then after making that decision,
>> decide on the styling.
>
> This a straw man. This whole part of the discussion started with your claim
> that a pseudo-element is 'definitely better' as opacity would otherwise
> be awkward as a default style. We don't believe this is a sufficient reason
> to require all browsers to add a pseudo-element, never mind requiring authors to
> deal with one. Especially when it doesn't address other interesting scenarios
> and user requests.
Arron's argument was in fact precisely what I said, and thus I wasn't
presenting a strawman. Your arguments seemed similar, but I'll accept
it you wish to assert that they weren't. My arguments were in a
different line entirely, related to author/user usefulness. I zeroed
in on a particular solution too early and missed out on some good
possibilities, but that's why we have review and discussion.
Everybody wins, yay!
> We also believe that if opacity requires extra pseudo-elements to work right
> then *maybe* opacity has a problem that needs fixing. Is that 'theoretical'?
> Really?
>
> There is nothing 'theoretical' about any of this. I have spent an entire
> release working on control styling and the feedback thereof. Believe me,
> it's quite real. And that experience motivates a strong desire to think
> about the use-case from a more general perspective than 'Opacity!
> Opacity! But what about opacity? We must have opacity!'. But somehow,
> the latter is the approach focused on users' concerns and the former
> is 'architecture astronautics'.
Anything that motivates someone to say, roughly, "Let's not worry
about how it'll actually be styled; it's more important to figure out
what type of selector to use for it first" is rightly vilified. ^_^
> Clearly, this won't get anywhere. Oh well.
You may have noticed that this is a meta-argument for our own
amusement, and that the actual discussion is productive enough
(there's a wiki page! People seem to be reasonably happy with option 5
so far!).
~TJ